Tuesday, March 20, 2012

In Akumajou Dracula X: Rondo for Blood for the PC Engine, there's a hidden staircase right before you fight the final boss. Once you walk up the steps to Dracula's chamber, you just have to jump around, hold up, and eventually you'll latch onto the invisible steps, carrying you to a secret room filled with cash. I've known about this for years and years, but what I didn't know was that this is actually a reference to a glitch from the Famicom Disk System version of Akumajou Dracula, the first Castlevania game.

I'm a little unclear on how to trigger it - this site gives some details, and this Youtube video shows it in action. It seems like you have to walk up and down until you "catch" the stairs a few pixels off, then walk upwards, past the actual steps, and continue on into oblivion. Obviously, there's nothing actually up in the sky other than glitched tiles and your eventual death, but with its allusion in Dracula X remarkably self conscious, and another bit of random depth in a game already overflowing with love and detail. Take note that this only works in the Famicom Disk System version, as well as all of the versions based off it, which include the GBA Mini cart and the Japanese VC release. The American and European carts, as well as the Japanese Famicom cart re-release, fixed this bug.

Symphony of the Night features the staircase in the same area, though its implementation is different. Here, you have to hit the upper wall to reveal a switch, which will in turn unfurl a visible staircase. Different items appear depending on if you're playing as Richter (in the prologue) or as Alucard later on.

11 comments:

mario 64 had some good glitches. theres the one when you can skip a small staircase by just jumping though a wall and the more well known one were you jump before those concreate slab guys slam down on you, you just warp through them and into perfect posistion to buttslam their backs. that last one was removed fomr mario galaxy 2 though, leading to insta death :(

I never knew that staircase was a glitch. I found it in SOTN. Always thought it was strange, but forgot to check to see if it was in another when I beat Chronicles. Fascinating how things like this keep reappearing in games, stranger how few peole realize what they refrence.

oh, what about the cement factory level in the original donkey kong? it was removed form the nes port due to size limitations but all versions after that was based on that version so the level vanished completely...

Thanks for the update on the glitch. I did not know the invisible stairs in Castlevania games are an homage to that. There are actually quite a few: for example "Castlevania: The Adventure" (the first Gameboy-CV, that only the patient players can and should appreciate) has invisible ropes (the equivalent to stairs in this entry) which lead to bonus rooms. "Super Castlevania IV", which is actually a remake of the original NES game, also has invisible stairs, right before the final boss-encounter . Walking on them leads to a shower of bonus-items. Seems to be a common feature in many CV games. Really cool stuff!

I like the cement factory level in the original Donkey Kong. I wish Nintendo would at the very least release that enhanced NES version on the Virtual Console for everyone to purchase, rather than keeping it exclusively on red European Wiis.